Obviously this creates a huge problem for pretty much everyone though, since we can imagine that our ordinary consumer products from all sorts countries could similarly explode if we ended up at war with the manufacturers.
and I interpret his analysis as that it was targeted enough to be legal.
You seem to be holding Israel to an impossible standard of guaranteeing zero collateral damage, which IHL does not require because no military is capable of that.
Maybe I'm wrong, but, I think Hezb0-lla-h is pretty much the "government", especially in southern Lebanon
That's much closer to a terrorist attack than to legal warfare.
Planting a bomb on each soldier would be even better.
Regardless, given the number of war crimes this army has been found guilty of, this is somewhat moot. What's another war crime in the grand scheme of things.
Anyway sadly even if they did start attacking civilians, say Palestinian civilians as a random example, who is going to enforce the penalty for war crimes. These days its seems they're more of a suggestion than a rule of engaging in war.
If anything, it's the opposite.
Afaik they intercepted a shipment for Hamas members only. Do you have more information?
How many civilians there even use these pagers instead of mobile phones? Are there any?
As an act of warfare, Israel did a splendid job on this. Thoroughly impressive work.
These attacks killed and maimed children, but firing JDAMs kills and maims even more children.
Not excusing the Israeli military here... they definitely dropped a lot of JDAMs, unguided artillery, and indiscriminate autocannon munitions on Gaza.
But the specific point on the pager attacks being against civilians is not a great argument.
Another thing I will note is that a lot of Palestinian groups also use similar reasoning towards targeting the Israeli population on the basis of the fact there is mass conscription in place.
Causality in war includes people that were only injured. This was far, far more than a 50% casualty rate. More like a 9552% casualty rate.
The reports are 4,000 wounded and 12 killed unintended targets in order to kill 42 targets.
On what planet is that “very few actual civilians”? I think you knew full well before posting that’s a ridiculous claim which is why you did it anonymously.
Which reports? According to whom? Hezbollah?
I've never heard of "42 targets", and given 12 people died total, obviously 42 targets were not killed.
You should provide some sourcing for your numbers.
Given this context: A limited number of specialty electronics, acquired and distributed by Hezbollah as a means of military command and control, and subsequent to this operation Hezbollah's C2 was demonstrably neutered--you believe that the majority of injuries were innocent civilians?
Basic logic indicates that the vast majority of those killed and injured were, in fact, nodes in Hezbollah's command and control structure.
I know people talk about the "entitlement epidemic", but entitlement is just another name from narcissism, in essence a lack of empathy. Which seems to be more and more socially acceptable and even rewarded (with internet points mostly), like your comment show (i'm not jumping on you, you are tamer than many, so i think it's a better exemple for my point than more violent ones).
And since that's the example we show our kids today, i'm now officially more worried about our society ability to handle social media than climate change.
But booby trapping mundane daily objects accessible to non-combatants is a clear violation of international law. No real room for leeway or interpretation on that one either.
So? You aren't off the hook because someone did something unexpected or "was exercising poor operational security."
You can do this to anything lol this logic goes wherever you need it to. A car bomb is simply an attack on hezbollah movement capabilities. Anything used by a hezbollah member is no longer a mundane object and so can be booby trapped. A terrorist is a person we treat like a terrorist, our killing you is proof of your guilt.
Where you draw the line is complicated. If you look at what the allies did in WWII for instance, there are some decisions that are highly problematic (firebombing wooden Japanese cities or the RAF deliberately bombing German civilian populations) but there are also some decisions that I think were reasonable even with a very high civilian death toll (e.g. the US Eight Air Force conducting bombing raids on German industry with limited precision, leading to high civilian casualties).
I think this specific incident was lawful. Hezbollah was the aggressor here, and it spent the war launching attacks that were far less justifiable than this one (much more limited targeting). I think this was a reasonable act of self-defense. That doesn't mean that I think that everything Israel did in the war was lawful.
I guess you've never given your phone to your toddler for 2 minutes to watch a video while you pooped in a public bathroom, huh?
I totally get the instinct to condemn the attack, since it's truly, deeply viscerally horrifying (not to mention terrifying!), but most of the rules about how you're supposed to conduct war basically boil down to 1. Make a reasonable effort to avoid disproportionately harming civilians 2. Don't go out of your way to inflict pain and suffering on your enemy beyond what's a necessary part of trying to kill or neutralize them 3. If your enemy is completely at your mercy, you have an extra duty to uphold 1 and 2.
Again, the pager attack is new, unusual, and just very upsetting. But it harmed civilians at a remarkably low rate, and the method of harm wasn't meaningfully more painful than just shooting someone. It compares very favorably with just bombing people on every metric other than maybe how scary it is if you're a combatant.
What you want to appeal to are just war principles.
I think if Lebanon found a clever way to assassinate the top 45 military commanders in Israel the same people who are defending this wouldn't be calling it a "Legal act of war".
If it was just random devices exploding, then sure, that could be considered terrorism. But it wasn't random devices, it was communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah to their own members for their own purposes.
Firstly, generals, like anybody else can be terrorized.
Secondly, even if you only kill generals, that doesn't mean you didn't cause terror for everybody else. Imagine for example that Hezbollah found a way to poison the food for Israel's top X military personnel. It would cause a state of emotional terror for many people in Israel about their food safety for decades most likely, even if they weren't in the military themselves.
Do you think that "normal" means of military action, like dropping a 500lb bomb, is less "terroristic" than essentially setting off a firecracker in their face/hands/pocket? Because, like, that's the alternative.
There isn't a universally agreed upon definition, but generally it refers to targeting non-combatants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism
For example, when the Allies tried to assassinate Hitler with a smuggled briefcase bomb during WW2, that wasn't terrorism: that was just regular warfare. Hitler was the leader of Germany and directed its military.
Similarly, smuggling pager bombs to members of Hezbollah generally wouldn't qualify as terrorism, since Hezbollah a) is a militia (famously it's the largest non-state militia in the world), and b) was actively fighting a war against Israel — a war that Hezbollah themselves initiated.
If it was done to "israelis", I bet you'd be singing a different tune. Imagine if iran or saudi arabia or anyone else did this to "israelis", some whiny people would be calling it terrorism.
I doubt Palantir had any involvement, just trying to get some credit. The operation to attack the supply chain was started long before Palantir had grown and could offer something.
It was an attack on civilians in pursuit of a non-military political goal. Terrorism. I think it was pretty successful on the terms of the people who carried it out but call it what it is.
You cannot seriously call it an attack "on civilians" - you especially cannot say that it's in pursuit of a non-military goal when it kicked off a literal military operation by crippling Hezbollah communications and (literally crippling) hundreds/thousands of their fighters. And in any case, all war is politics.
It's what "israel" specializes in. When you read the history of "israel", it's literally a series of acts of terrorism.
Has anyone here tried using their software? It's salesforce-level fucked. They did a great job spewing lofty concepts, with their ontologies and their kinetic layers, but in the end it all ends up being a giant wormy ERP. There might be one good idea in there (articulating the schemas and transformations in separate layers) but overall it's a perfect vibe match for orwellian bureaucracies.
Crazy how modern companies want to be McFranchise level of capable. What are you adding as a company if you outsource everything that can make your company a differentiator and your company is just plug and play cogs?
If you don't believe that, you shouldn't be investing.
If you're going to make this argument, it'll only apply to private companies in founders' hands, maybe to family businesses, but certainly not to public companies.
Also did they really call it Operation Grim Beeper? Hilarious if true (but I suspect not given how codenames are meant to work).
The moderation intention is for comments which break the site guidelines to be flagged, regardless of which side they are or aren't on. It's not possible to reach this state perfectly, of course.
as example, just below there is reply to you saying that flagging been abused, been flagged
That number is much too high IMO, so I assume we interpret the site guidelines very differently.
> as example, just below there is reply to you saying that flagging been abused, been flagged
I assume you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221396? No, you'd see "[flagged]" if that were the case. The comment is [dead], but it was killed by software, not flagged by users. I'll restore it.
Nobody will ever think "That was a well-reasoned argument I now believe war crimes were, or were not, committed".
The best thing to do on posts like this is avoid reading them, or flag them.
It feels like there's an obviously correct side to most of these issues, the problem is half the audience here believes their side is correct and yours is wrong.
It is one of the most precise military ops in history.
Military/terrorist group procures communication devices to coordinate military operations. Explosive is sized to injure the holder, not bystanders - per CCTV videos, eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2024/sep/18/cctv-cap...
Hard to get more precise/targeted than that!
In contrast to:
The attack was far from indiscriminate, it was in fact probably the most discriminate attack possible as the spicy pagers were exclusively used by terrorists.
This site is for curious, thoughtful, respectful, and kind interaction—most of all with those you may disagree with, regardless of how bad they are or you feel they are.
If that's not possible, it's ok not to post. We'd rather have a thread with no comments than a thread with aggressive comments, let alone nationalistic or religious flamewar. There is far too much aggression in the thread below, which is is understandable, but please don't add more. I know it provides a fleeting sensation of relief, but then it just makes everything worse.
Note this, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
The mental gymnastics required to justify the maiming and killing of civilians that Israel engages in DAILY is quite troubling to see.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pa...
https://www.newarab.com/analysis/why-israels-pager-attacks-l...
That is not true. They targeted devices acquired by Hezbollah and distributed by Hezbollah to their commanders. These devices has a military purpose and never entered the civilian supply chain.
I think most people are ok with terrorists being attacked.
Is this like, live location information provided from social media/carriers/etc? Is it AI guessing who might be a target based on collected data?
ComputerGuru•3h ago
jjk166•3h ago
gs17•37m ago